PUT PROJECT IN MOTHBALLS

A scientist who has been trapping moths near his home at Merseyside, England, for the past 25 years has documented a steep decline in dark peppered moths, from 90 percent of the total before 1957 to 60 percent in 1984.

-- Associated Press

Well, you can't envy a guy who's spent the past 25 years trapping moths for a living, can you?

But you also can't deny that his diligence has led to some insights into evolution and air pollution.

This story goes back to the shift in predominance from white to black peppered moths in 19th century England when smoke belching from the new factories of the industrial revolution darkened the landscape and killed light-colored lichens on tree trunks, rocks and walls.

As their resting places blackened, supposedly the white form of the moth lost its camouflage and became easy prey for birds while the black became less visible.

Now Sir Cyril Clark, the scientist gamely trapping moths for the past 25 years, may soon be in a position to say if the coloration of the white moths is protective again as the environment, thanks to clean air laws, has become clearer and brighter.

So, OK. You didn't ask. But the reason I bring it up is because this kind of research drives me crazy.

I don't mean it drives me crazy the way it does Sen. William Proxmire, causing him to bludgeon perpetrators of the research with his famous Golden Fleece Award for wasting time and money.

What drives me crazy about it is trying to imagine how anybody ever thinks of these cockamamie studies in the first place.

I wonder, for example, about the research team in Honolulu who has spent the past six years trying to engage a pair of bottled-nosed dolphins in conversation.

("Someday," these researchers now say, "man might be able to talk to dolphins in such a way as to ask questions like, 'What are your migratory patterns?' ")

Or take the scientists who went to the trouble of attaching brightly colored bands to the legs of a few hundred birds and then correlated band color with incidences of sexual attraction among flockmates.

And how about the research team that's busy breeding numbats in captivity?

So far 10 numbats ("one of the world's smallest marsupials") have been bred in captivity which "raises hopes" (and naturally I'm quoting the research team here) "raises hopes that zoos may establish breeding colonies to supply numbats for reintroduction to the wild."

Evidently these characters (not the researchers, the numbats), once were common in Australia, but now are rare.

Well, fine. No doubt the wilds of Australia will benefit hugely from re- introduction of numbats, but what's difficult to picture is the scenario that develops into undertakings of this kind.

Try to imagine some guy saying to somebody else, "Boy, Harold, if those two bottle-nosed dolphins could only talk, huh?"

"Yeah, Marty," says his companion. "Imagine the stories they could tell, like about their migratory patterns and whatnot."

"You know, that gives me an idea, Harold. Oh, it might take six or maybe 600 years before we got results, but what if what got some big flash cards and . . . ?"

"You know what, Marty? You're out to lunch, Marty. You're so far out to lunch you won't be back until March, Marty. Maybe April."

And now that I think about it, the question of how experiments like these come about isn't the only one that comes to mind after all.

I mean, you also have to wonder how many black and/or white moths there would be in Merseyside today if Sir Cyril Clark hadn't spent the past 25 trapping them.